Friday, May 4, 2018

A group of 'top Destiny players' played the mode at Bungie's studio, but we won't see it until E3.

Next week will see the release of Warmind, the second piece of DLC for Destiny 2, which is likely to improve but probably not radically alter the fate of Bungie's troubled, shared-world shooter. The reason being that although the developer has been busy absorbing feedback from its fairly cross community, it takes a while to turn that information into tangible features. For real systemic change, the signs all suggest we're going to have to wait until the major expansion scheduled for this fall.
The latest of those signs came today during Activision Blizzard's first quarter earnings call, when the company briefly discussed its plans for the future of Destiny 2. The usual generalities came up—they want to make the player "more powerful" and the endgame "more meaningful"—but we did get one (very small) nugget of information: a new mode will be coming as part of the fall expansion, and Activision thinks it's going to be a big deal.

Destiny 2 didn't feature in Activision's 'Audience Reach' slide, which doesn't suggest a stellar active playerbase.
According to COO Coddy Johnson, the mode is "incredibly engaging" and features a "whole new style of play". That new style of play is new to "first-person shooter gaming generally," he says, not just Destiny 2. So it's probably not any kind of battle royale mode, though rumors of a Call of Duty battle royale mode have been kicking around for a while, and the success of PUBG, Fortnite et al has clearly not gone unnoticed by Bobby Kotick and co.
Nothing else was said regarding the mystery mode, other than that more will be revealed at E3, so presumably we'll see a full match, or at least a trailer, in June—most likely at the Sony press conference on Monday evening. One thing to note is that a group of community content creators was invited to Bungie's Bellevue, Washington studio a couple of weeks ago, and got to play the mode. Johnson says the response was "very positive." While the community players are unsurprisingly bound by NDA not to go into any detail about what the mode entails, the feedback we've seen does appear to be positive, if not necessarily indicative of it being the kind of game changer Activision seems to be suggesting.
We'll have more on Warmind next week, assuming we can find some other players to play competitive mode to grind for this bloody gun.